Date: 2009jul1 OS: Linux Q. How do I view a .1 file? A. Linux man (manual) files have a .1 suffix and live in /usr/share/man/man1 There are other folders too. Normally to access a man page you just do:

man <COMMAND>

For example, to get info about the "yes" command:

man yes

This the same as doing:

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/yes.1.gz | nroff -man

Since the man pages are compressed you need to uncompress it with zcat. Then process it into a readable form with nroff. So now if you run into a .1 file that is not installed -- say part of a source code package -- you can view it.

nroff -man yes.1